Born and raised in the Islington area of north London, Leona Lewis had an ambition for a music career from the age of 13. Lewis graduated from the prestigious BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology and while working as a receptionist and pizza waitress and writing her own material, she auditioned for The X Factor in the summer of 2006. She eventually won the competition in a landslide victory. Vocally Lewis has been compared to Whitney Houston and her sophisticated R&B voice is versatile in both pop and soul genres.
Her debut single in the United Kingdom,
A Moment Like This, broke a world record after it was downloaded over 50,000 times within just thirty minutes of its release and was subsequently awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Best Selling British Single. Her second single,
Bleeding Love, was the biggest-selling single of 2007 in the UK, topped over thirty international singles charts and went on to become the biggest selling single of the twenty-first century by any female, rocketing Lewis to international stardom.
Lewis' debut album,
Spirit, was released throughout Europe in 2007 and became the fastest-selling debut album ever in both the United Kingdom and Ireland. Upon release in North America in 2008,
Spirit went straight to number one on the Billboard 200 album chart, making Lewis the only British solo artist to have topped the chart with a debut album. Her cover of the Snow Patrol song
Run, became the fastest selling digital-only release of all time, having sold nearly 70,000 downloads in just two days. By the end of the first week, download sales had reached in excess of 131,000, some eight thousand below the first week sales of
A Moment Like This. Lewis reached number one in both Ireland and the UK purely from downloads of the song.
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